France: Interiors by Stone Age man

We all look for tranquillity when we go to France, but some are more successful than others. Herb Greer seeks it underground.

'SSSHHHH!" The guide held up his lamp. Our small group instinctively moved closer together as the lamp went out. We stood in silent, total darkness.

"Ecoutez!" For a moment after the whisper a hush seemed to open out around us. Feet shuffled in the cold silence. And then we heard it: a soft plinking and plunking, water dripping from the stalactites above us on to the damp stone below. The notes were clearly audible, almost like tiny bells: now a D, a B, an F sharp, up, down, ringing in the stillness. This was the same random tune that Cro-Magnon man had listened to more than 20,000 years ago, while he scratched engravings and sketched a crude human face on the damp rock wall. Next to it on an outcrop was a bison's head, its ochre-outlined eye vivid enough to send a frisson up the spine.

We were standing in the Grotte de Bernifal near Les Eyzies on the southern rim of the Dordogne. This eerie music was the climax of a tour that had begun several miles away in Quercy near the Lot River.

For years a kind of chthonic attraction had drawn me to spend my holidays walking in the painted caves of southern Europe. There are hundreds of them, many now barred to the public. As a student I had paused, wondering, before the ancient murals of Lascaux, the so-called Sistine Chapel of prehistoric man. I remember the walls as unnaturally wet and gleaming, the result of too many idly curious visitors breathing too much humidity into the cavern. In time this gave rise to what the French call la maladie blanche, a mouldy growth that threatened to destroy the ochre and manganese oxide paintings.

The delicate and sophisticated portraits of deer, bison and mammoth at Lascaux can now be seen only in a fibreglass reproduction of the cave, called Lascaux II. But a few of these prehistoric art galleries are still accessible to casual visitors. Our first stop this trip was the Grotte de Pech-Merle, at Cabrerets, just along the Lot River east of Cahors.

We were ushered into an anteroom where the guide lectured us briefly (in French, with an English text provided) on what we were going to see. He described the insidious maladie blanche, and warned us against breathing too close to the paintings or touching them.

Back in the 1950s, the Surrealist painter André Breton, who lived nearby, visited the cave in what the guide called "not a normal condition of mind", by which he meant that Breton was probably drunk. Approaching a particularly fine black-lined mammoth, Breton suddenly bellowed that the pictures were all forgeries, made by madmen, and began to wipe the lines off the stone. An official pulled him away. The furious Breton shouted, "Do you know who I am?" and the official replied calmly: "I don't care if you're the King of Spain!" and rapped him across the wrist, hard, with a walking stick. Breton was arrested and fined heavily. Today, such a stunt would attract a custodial sentence.

Behind a heavy metal door, steps lead down into the great cavern; its constant chill has helped to preserve the paintings over millennia. Slowly we filed along the entrance galleries and into what looked like a vast cathedral. Strategically placed spotlights highlighted sharpened stone pillars, which glowed in shades of pale onyx and off-white; draperies of stone seemed to hang over the edge of great tilted saucers. Below these, along the pallid stone walls, Cro-Magnon man had crouched by the light of a fat-fed lamp, etching and painting bison, deer, mammoth, horses and strange triangular symbols. The picture that Breton damaged is, like the other painted walls, now protected by wire mesh.

The guide pointed up at the ochre outline of a wild ram on the cave roof. Carbon dating of material lifted from the paintings had established an age of about 24,000 years - and the lines were as clear and clean as if they had been painted the previous week.

We passed a small basin where dripping water had formed a curious assembly of small, perfectly spherical stone pearls; mounting a slope, we looked over a rail, and there, preserved in petrified mud, were several human footprints. Farther on, we passed the outlines of more mammoths engraved into the stone.

After a while, dazzled by the elegance of the stone formations, we looked down and suddenly saw that the walls were empty. We had passed the cavern's deepest point of penetration by Cro-Magnon man. Here, the guide pressed a button to illuminate more extravagantly beautiful petroglyphs, sculpted out of thick lime strata by an acid-rich underground river, then re-formed by lime-saturated water dripping steadily over thousands of millennia.

In another gallery, an outcrop of rock, resembling a small-headed horse, had been finger-painted with the portraits of two Przewalski horses; one faced left, the other right, its head shaped by the outcrop and coloured in with eyes and a dark mane. Both horses were covered with coloured spots, and the picture was marked (perhaps signed?) with the negative outlines of five human hands.

No one really knows why the drawings were made. It is the last great mystery of archaeology, and one that will never be solved.

A few miles north of Pech-Merle lie the Grottes de Cougnac, more modest caves with lower ceilings and narrower galleries whose floors have been trenched out to provide headroom for visitors. One grotto is roofed with a stunning profusion of fine stalactites that are lit in pastel colours as you pass beneath them. The second contains the paintings for which Cougnac is known - fewer than at Pech-Merle, but including human figures - one a hunter with his bottom apparently shot full of arrows, and another figure lying down, stuck through with the same arrows.

The animals on the wall - horses, bison, deer, antlered elk and wild rams with beautifully curved high horns - seemed simple at first sight, with one of the horses distorted, as a child might draw it. Smiling, the chief guide, Francis Jach, asked us to lean down a little and view it from a lower angle. The outline was curved over the bulge of the rock wall to provide a 3-D effect and deliberately skewed to look normal when viewed from the low angle. Where had those "primitive men" developed such a sophisticated technique? Mr Jach shrugged and smiled.

Our final stop in the cave at Bernifal did nothing to clear up these puzzles. As we stood listening in the dark to the bell-like music of drops falling on ancient stone, the mystery only deepened.